Next: The Google Street Journal

Working at a major metropolitan newspaper these days can feel a bit like working for the East German Politburo, circa 1988. It's a good gig with great benefits, and people seek you out at cocktail parties, but you have this sense that your days are numbered.

Old media continues to fret over the rise of new media, the dividing line being the presence (or lack of) in the digital world. Old media continues to garner most of the advertising spend, while new media must make do with $0.01 CPM rates (I wonder what the CPM is for a typical ad in the LA Times or Chicago Tribune these days...oh wait, they don't use CPM but column inches. Hmm.).

Old media continues to lock away online content behind registration screens, and archives behind pay-per-article walls. While I don't have a problem with some sort of registration (they need to make money somehow, and with people frequently zapping their ads, registration is at least one way to gauge their audience), registration blocks these sites from appearing in search results. I don't know anyone who uses a portal these days, at least on the open Internet. My portal is either my bloglines page or the results from a Google search. I go days without reading a given site's home page, RSS and Atom give me deep links to the content I want to read. For all the fights over deep linking over the past decade, there seems to be no concern about the loss due to deep linking from syndicated feeds.

I read more online these days than I used to, I credit (or blame?) Bloglines for increasing my content throughput. I skim hundreds, if not the low thousands, of articles per day, opening new Firefox tabs for the articles which seem interesting (which means I still read the article in the context of the web page, unless the gist of the article can be had from the content in the syndicated feed).

The only problem I have is when I fall behind: it's easy to fall way behind. Clearly I don't want to sift through and read two-three-four days of syndicated feeds to identify the ten or twenty I'd have read had I seen them initially. Instead I need some way to identify these key articles… attention.xml (see: here, here, or here) might be a solution (basically, from what I've read, it's another feed of sorts, except it is a feed of your feeds and articles in those feeds, and possibly a rating or "read/not-read" rating attached to each article. Or not.).

I wonder if the decline (alleged, but I believe it) in old media audience share is reflected in advertiser's success rates?